RAIDR: Retention-Aware Intelligent DRAM Refresh

Dynamic Random-Access Memory (DRAM) is the building block of modern main memory systems. DRAM cells must be periodically refreshed to prevent loss of data. These refresh operations waste energy and degrade system performance by interfering with memory accesses. The negative effects of DRAM refresh increase as DRAM device capacity increases. Existing DRAM devices refresh all cells at a rate determined by the leakiest cell in the device. However, most DRAM cells can retain data for significantly longer. Therefore, many of these refreshes are unnecessary. In this paper, the authors propose RAIDR (Retention-Aware Intelligent DRAM Refresh), a low-cost mechanism that can identify and skip unnecessary refreshes using knowledge of cell retention times.